Keepers and goners in 2012

For independent professionals, time is probably the most valuable commodity.

We strive to save it – by becoming more efficient and productive. We aim to invest it wisely – by targeting our social media marcomm efforts well and being active in the right professional organizations. And we aim to find balance between our professional and personal time. 

Less is more

As an increasing number of social media and professional networks compete for our attention and participation, freelancers face a tough choice: to participate lightly in many or in a more committed fashion in a few? The answer depends, in part, on your goals.

For me, social media and professional networks are a vehicle through which to engage with and ultimately meet others in person. Developing relationships takes time, commitment and regularity and I plan to focus my efforts better in 2012.

Keepers

Twitter

Twitter is a fabulous information resource. Thanks to fellow Tweeps, I’ve discovered terrific blogs to follow, gotten answers to questions in a jiffy, and enjoyed many conversations with colleagues through the workday. Better still is having had the chance to meet followers and colleagues in the flesh, especially during the Journée mondiale de la traduction last December (#JMT2011).

LinkedIn

As member number 304,812 I joined LinkedIn before it even had 1 million members, but didn’t start really making use of it until about two years ago. As of November 2011, it has over 135 million members, with about 3 million in France, making it a much more useful tool in my target market.

Société française des traducteurs

Choosing to remain an active member of France’s union of professional translators is a no-brainer! Collegiality, a lively private discussion list, a rich CPD offering and local events, in addition to group insurance plans, combine to make this membership a worthwhile investment all around.

Communication et Entreprise

Another keeper! The oldest association of professional communicators in France gathers corporates, public institutions, communication agencies and independent professionals. It hosts regular workshops and round tables, publishes a quarterly magazine (for which I’ve been interviewed twice!), spearheads issue-oriented projects (such as the Guide de la relation Indépendant – Entreprise/Agence), and offers a solid and diverse CPD programme in which I’ll be instructor as well as student this year.

Goners

Viadeo

I’ve been a premium member of Viadeo for the past two years (because you can hardly do anything on that network otherwise), but I shall not be renewing it, cheap as it may be. I find it cumbersome to navigate and too filled with service and product offer broadcasts. I don’t find it an appealing space in which to spend time and contribute. I’ll keep my profile alive but won’t rely on Viadeo in my networking or business development endeavors.

IABC

I joined IABC (the International Association of Business Communicators) last summer, seduced by its information and resource-filled website and incredibly rich live and remote conferences and courses. I’ve read its quarterly magazine from cover to cover and shall probably order some of its publications before my membership runs out.

It’s a great organization, so why am I not renewing my membership? Because all that drew me in is tough to afford for an independent professional. Every single conference, workshop or course (even remotely delivered) I’ve been interested in signing up for had a price tag above $1,000. Even one-hour webinars cost around $100 for members. It is an organization that seems to cater to large corporates and their managers, not SMB or independent professionals. And that’s a pity. They could, as Communication & Entreprise does, apply rate scales depending on the size of the member organization, allowing for a fruitful mix of all players in the corporate communications professions.

Klout

After reading Pam Moore’s blog article Why I deleted my Klout profile, I went ahead and did so as well. I’m not on Facebook for a plethora of privacy and copyright issues, and Pam’s article explained well the similar drawbacks with Klout.  Thanks Pam!

Explorations

I signed up for Google+ when it came out in beta, but haven’t taken the time yet to learn to use it properly. I’ll play with it before making a decision. Advice and how-to’s most welcome!

Your choices and recommendations?

Where will you invest your precious time in 2012? Do you take a “sprinkle approach” or a concentrated one and why? What networks and organizations have you found worthwhile and would recommend to others?

I dip raw vegetables in tangy sour cream and chives.

I dip my toe in the ocean to test the temperature.

I dip into my savings if a client pays late.

And I’ve been known to dip truffles into black chocolate in preparing Christmas gifts.

I insert bank cards 

Until recently, on both sides of the Atlantic, paying with plastic or getting money out of an ATM required inserting your card and leaving it in the slot until your transaction was complete. It’s explained here, see point 3.

I picked up my new bank card a few days ago and it was a good thing my account manager insisted we made sure it worked. So off we go to the ATM machine to withdraw $20.

Confidently, I insert my card and remove my hand.

No, no! Just dip your card.

(Dip my card? Huh? What’s she talking about?)

Like this (account manager shows me a smooth high-speed technique).

I successfully mastered “dipping my card”, left the bank, and wondered whether this was a widely-accepted change in credit card  lingo.

If you don’t know dip, you can’t shop

I dashed into the subway to pick up a MetroCard at one of the vending machines and followed the instructions: language (English), type of card (new card), ride plan (7-day unlimited), payment choice (credit card), receipt (yes):

DIP YOUR CARD TO PAY, says the machine.

Thank goodness, I knew what that meant and completed my purchase quickly. Without my crash course in  Dipping 101, my first day in my old home town would have been fraught with frustration!

Dipping in France

Inevitably, dipping will come to France.

What French expression will become mainstream to describe this technique?

Dipper? Oh puhlease…

Tremper? That’s what I do to my croissant in steaming café au lait.

French translators, chime in here: what would you suggest to dip your credit card?

1. Comment rédiger une proposition (March 2010)
2. High context v. low context cultures and getting your message across (August 2009)
3. Traducteurs : comment développer une nouvelle spécialisation (October 2010)
4. Translators: 6 steps to develop a translation specialization (June 2010)
5. Five reasons why it’s hard to say no to a client (April 2011)
6. Guide de la transcréation (March 2011)
7. Devis ou proposition : quelle différence ? (February 2010)
8. Valoriser son expérience quand on n’en a pas beaucoup (April 2010)
9. Speech writing for and coaching a non-native speaker (May 2011)
10. Knowing how your brain works can boost your productivity (May 2010)

 Among my personal favorites that did not (yet) make it to the Top 10 list, I’d include:

1. Le couple prospect-prestataire : décryptez-vous efficacement (November 2010)
2. Communication interculturelle : ajustez le curseur dans vos courriels (October 2010)
3. Silence, a powerful negotiation tool (April 2010)
4. Professional service firm web copy: speak with me, not at me (March 2010)

What subjects would you like to read about? Feel free to send in your suggestions and requests by leaving a comment below.

I knew – unsurprisingly – that France is way behind in the use of social media, but did not realize quite how far behind. Many of my clients are not on Twitter, LinkedIn and Viadeo – the major professional platforms. Many of my freelance colleagues don’t even have a website. And so on.

“What you see depends on where you sit,” one of my professors at university said frequently during his International Negotiation lectures.

What type of translation needs will social media trigger? How will they be fulfilled and delivered? What are some of the key intercultural issues in their wide adoption and use? What core values do they touch on?

What would you, readers, like to discuss?

It would be great if you’d contribute your thoughts, ideas and questions so that we can kick-start a useful dialog on how our roles as language and culture experts may evolve as social media becomes more prevalent in our corporate clients’ marketing and communications strategies.

Over to you!

So you want to specialize?

Cliquez ici pour la version française

One of the Intercultural Zone’s faithful readers, Catherine Jan, emailed a few days ago with a specific request:

“Can you offer some advice on how to develop a new area of specialization?  I’d like to dig deeper [into the area of photovoltaics] and find work in this area. But I have no previous experience to refer to.”

That’s a great topic, Catherine, thanks for suggesting it.

Readers are invited to contribute their advice and to suggest other topics for future posts!

1. Choose the new area with care
Commitment

Developing a new area of specialization is a serious commitment. You’ll be investing time and energy for a future ROI. Where are you going to steal that time from? Your work hours (assess how many you can afford to invest)? Or the time you spend with your loved ones (getting their support is important)?

This new expertise has to prove sustainable.

• The subject has to be compelling: Does it speak to me? Do I have a real feeling for it? Will it satisfy my intellect for a long time? Would having to adapt 100 pages in one shot boost my brain or put me to sleep?
• Is the demand for this area of specialization durable, or is it some fly-by-night trendy craze businesses will ignore in a year or two?
• Is this area of specialization is narrow enough that I would provide real added value (and bill accordingly), yet not so restrictive as to make my new skills hard to market?
• What areas do I already specialize in I can leverage to land projects in this new field?

2. Plan
Road map

Make a business plan for this particular area, just as if you were starting a new business.

Figure out what you need to invest in, what that is going to cost, how you are going to fund these investments, over what period of time. The main ticket is your time. And it isn’t free. Develop an early prospect list. The ideal is to speak with some of them to get some of the info needed to conduct your own SWOT analysis. Estimate also what ROI you can reasonably expect within the next year or two.

Are the signals green or are a there a couple of yellow blinking lights?

3. Assemble the basics
Curiosity

Go on a treasure hunt! What’s out there that can help you scope the subject and focus how you are to acquire this special knowledge?

Professional associations and publications, specialized glossaries and dictionaries, upcoming trade shows, recognized specialists, fellow translators, companies and annual reports. What aspects of this new field interest  you most?

What related knowledge might you need? In Catherine’s example – photovoltaics for domestic use – might familiarity with architecture, roofing, and national/local programmes supporting the development of sustainable energies be useful?

Always, READ and QUESTION!

4. Go sniff around
Build relationships

Sniffing around is fun and important. Attending trade shows, demos, playing mystery customer and so on are great ways to discover the culture and the environment of the field you seek to become involved with. Who are the players? What are they like? What savoir-faire and savoir-être did they need to become successful? What issues affecting their business keep them up at night?

Developing a new specialization also means creating a new client base, individuals and companies with whom you are going to build relationships. To do so, it is important to speak their language, understand their world and default to curiosity and empathy to connect successfully with them as a professional and as an individual.

5. Find training opportunities
Reach out

Depending on your targeted specialization, there may or may not be a large choice of courses you can sign up for (translation-specific or otherwise). If it’s a desert out there, you’ll just have to be more creative.

A few suggestions:

• Go where it happens: get a guided tour of a factory or plant, research lab, and so on. You know where what you are aiming for happens.
• Find specialized colleagues for insider advice, mentoring, resources that didn’t hit your radar yet.
• Find barter opportunities: by now, you’ll have assembled a list of prospects and contacts. Some may be willing to swap, say, your helping them spruce up their language skills in exchange for them helping you understand some challenging aspect of your new field, reviewing a home-grown glossary, or allowing you to be an observer for a few days of the company’s activities.

6. Getting those first projects
Generosity and diligence

You will have noticed (yes??), there is a build up here. You have started to develop relationships with individuals in your targeted domain. You’ve demonstrated your commitment, interest, resourcefulness, openness and skill over time. And they have provided valuable help along the way.  These individuals should be the first you target, with modesty. Why?

- They know you. Showing up is half the battle!
- They have already invested in you. Most would be willing to do so again and want to see an ROI.
- They know you are not a top expert yet. They expect you will ask questions and have doubts, and they are more likely to provide that valuable feedback than clients who have not been privy to your learning process. They recognize the added value you ARE in a position to offer them, whether it be in the quality of your writing skills or your proficiency in related domains (for example, translating a legal contract for a photovoltaic start-up).

Let’s hear some success stories from colleagues!

Some time last year, a client – we’ll name him Monsieur M. to protect his good name – asked me to translate a press release from French into US English.  This communiqué announced a major event for his young company and was written in a very ‘markety’, trendy and catchy style.

As is often the case, a close-to-the-source-text translation would fall flat. Also, and readers, you know this: a press release for the US market is structured quite differently from a French communiqué.

So I revamped the document to make it fit-for-purpose. Adapted the style and mode of communication (French is a high context language and culture, American a low context one). Rreplaced French popular culture references with American ones. Polished up the text and sent it off to Monsieur M.

An hour later, the phone rings.

Monsieur M.: Patricia, you’ve sent me the wrong file. This is not the translation I asked for.

Me: Pardon? [panic attack sets in] Hang on; let me look into this …. [Double-check sent email and attached file]. Si, si! It’s the right file [provide file name], are you sure you opened the right document?

Monsieur M.: I am sure you sent me the wrong file. My communiqué had 4 paragraphs and 24 lines. This file has 5 paragraphs, but only 17 lines. And everyone knows a good translation respects the source file’s layout and appearance. This thing does not look anything like my communiqué.

As you master increasingly difficult positions, proper breathing becomes automatic: you are no longer consciously engaged in leading your body’s inspiration-expiration dance.

Writing workshop

Ros Schwartz and Chris Durban’s writing workshop for translators, Style Matters I, held in Paris February 5^th, was an immersion in writing translations for publication.

It offered valuable advice and techniques for those wishing to hone their craft and invited a return to consciousness for those used to leveraging their writing skills to serve their clients’ interests.

Writers and translators rely on proficiency of language to craft high impact texts. They also use their senses and their instinct, just as painters and musicians do to give life to colors and notes. With experience, techniques learned and practiced merge with creative intuition, words flowing together in an artful dance as if graced with a life of their own.

Conscious choreography

Working in a group spurs conscious engagement.

Why did we choose a word rather than another? What awkwardness in this turn of phrase tickled your pen to change it? What effect do you think this change has on the balance of the text or on the message it is to carry? What solutions did colleagues find to transform gibberish into music?

Chris asked me whether I’d found the course useful.

The answer is a resounding yes, for several reasons. It spurred a return to the consciousness of doing, and the satisfaction and enrichment this brings. Watching how colleagues approach a text and hearing the solutions proposed can boost your own creativity. And developing relationships with others who work in similar areas broadens opportunities, as a team, to take on complex projects for demanding clients.

And I learned that, in UK English, an m-dash is an n-dash and it takes a space before and after it.

So, when is Style II coming to town?

The client is not always right. Sometimes the end client commits translation roadkill by:

1. Starting work on a bilingual publication without putting its translation team in place.

2. Contacting its translation team with a stated volume and deadline, but with only half the texts written and no clear date when the rest of the files will be available.

3. Shortening the deadline by half once the translation is already under way (and the rest of the source texts still unavailable).

4. Scurrying about to find extra translators to handle the volume in the reduced amount of time.

5. Allowing no time for review and harmonization of all the texts translated by a slew of last-minute recruits.

This is just what happened to a wonderful corporate book on which a respected colleague had asked me to work with him. We are finishing the sections we had started and calling it quits.

We work hard and long for projects we can be proud of. We won’t even consider whipping through an entire book in under a week. “We don’t do MT”.

Disappointing? Of course. But the big looser is the end client. They’ve tossed a nice chunk of change right out the window and won’t have much to show for it.

Savvy clients invest. They do the exact opposite of each point above because they want their corporate books to shine in all languages.

As I work my way through 30 Days to Better Business Writing, Matthew Stibbe’s recently published e-book for wordsmiths, several chapters swirl in my head, calling for a client-oriented version.

Maybe even client-oriented versions in other languages. Take Day 7, “Analyse bad writing”, and Day 16, “Manage your writing”, for example.

Selling copywriting services to companies that recognize the benefits of good copy is a relative cakewalk. Selling to those that are the most in need of good writers is often an uphill battle. The are many reasons for mind-deadening copy, but two stand out:

• A lack of awareness of how ineffective the company’s written communications really are (and how they got that way)
• A not infrequent epidermic reaction by the text’s author to suggestions for improvement (often senior in-house staff)

The challenge is compounded when striving to produce compelling copy in another language from insipid source text. If Churchill had lived in the Internet age and perused multilingual corporate websites, I doubt he could have claimed “eating words has never given me indigestion.”

Tweaking some of 30 Days’ chapters to resonate with business writing buyers might just offer the gentle push some companies need to look at their copy more objectively. It would be the perfect companion to Chris Durban’s often cited guide to buying translations, Translation: Getting it Right.

A good team is more important to a successful business than products or profits, according to Lee Iacocca. Including good writers on your corporate team is an essential investment. “You can have brilliant ideas, but if you can’t get them across, your ideas won’t get you anywhere,” he quipped.

In any language.

Where others collect coins, stamps, or eggcups, I collect storage hardware: 3 1/2 inch diskettes, SuperDisks, Zip disks, CD-Roms, external hard drives, flash drives, smart cards, USB keys, and the computers whose data they preserved.

A bit excessive? Probably. The memory of a serious scolding when I was a child remains. Told to go clean up my room, I did just that, and pitched a bunch of family letters my eight year-old’s logic considered useless to keep. The rule of thumb for data has become “better safe than sorry.”

I’ve tried to convey that fear to my husband. Largely unsuccessfully. Where I keep multiple copies of all my data, only recently did he heed the call to back-up his computer on an external hard drive. He didn’t see the point of repeating this time-consuming process twice.

Last week, his computer was infected with a virus. While he was doing a clean reinstall, the  external HDD fell. It’s toast. He lost a magnificent slide collection representing decades of work in the northern Alps. We hope data recovery experts will be able to salvage it.

My multiple copies and daily back-up routines don’t seem as loony now. If one gizmo breaks down, I don’t waste time running to the data hospital and I know my clients’ documents are safe. Last year, a client phoned, panicked: the company’s IT system had been infected and my client had lost a year’s worth of documents we had worked on together. Within an hour, I sent my client a zip file with all the source documents, translations, and the in-house glossary we had developed to provide that organization with reliable terminology standards.

Andrew Bell over at the Watercooler has chosen Sustainability in Translation as the theme for his October book contest. Preserving data integrity is one of the keys to providing value and service to clients (even years after a job is done), working both efficiently and effectively, building on your knowledge and skills.

If you are a back-up junkie? Tell us how that has served your business and your clients’ needs!